Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga.

You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advantage of Japanese and more programming-like is the combination of kanjis to make up new words but even then the pronunciation might totally change. For example in Spanish:

"I eat beef" = "Yo como ternera" = subject + verb + object. Both in Japanese and Spanish, but not in English, you can omit the subject "yo"/"watashi". But this is so syntetic that people wouldn't use normally, I might instead want to say how good cow meat is and say "¡me encanta la ternera!" "Gyuniku ga suge ski!" (transliterated), in Japanese effectively eating up some random letters there.

I was thinking something similar while reading the article. Studying Japanese it's easy at first, and even kanji is easier than it appears, but eventually there is a huge increase in difficulty when you get to advanced grammar and conjugation, which changes based on tense, voice, imperative/not, gender, ranking, politeness level, etc. Every language is like this, although every language has its own unique quirks and difficult points.

Learning it is also kind of like learning physics in high school. After a few years you realise the first things you learn are a bootstrap to get started and not actually used in daily speech. Simple example: You hear the words "anata" ("you") and "sayonara" ("goodbye") one time in a month, but you will use them all the time in beginner Japanese class.

I don't speak Japanese, so this is kind of half baked, but I find the OP description of "transform polite present tense" explanation a little confusing. Or at least, maybe it assumes we don't do that in English? Or this is using a bad example? Let me explain.

"I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Something about "I eat beef" as a statement conjures chest pounding imagery (it sounds primitive), so I'd propose we often pass through a sort of politeness filter too?

Anyways as a English only programmer, I don't know if I learned anything from the article - maybe you have to speak Japanese to get it?

A bit that you can get away with learning: in English, the things foreigners start learning (and probably you in elementary school about the language and its structure are closer to the actual English usage compared to other languages like Spanish and Japanese. In my example, the textbook beginner "I eat beef" is very out of place usually in the 3 languages, but in English "I like/love beef" are perfectly valid examples that still follow the same basic/beginner structure of "I eat beef" and are valid. In Japanese and Spanish, you have to change the whole sentence structure to not sound like a robot.

(English grammar being simpler in this trifecta, but then in exchange you have the crazy pronunciation learning of English that I found out I would never "fully learn" and nobody really does in English, since you even have literal competitions (spelling bees) where people show off how good they are at it, and with jokes still happening between professionals like "is it 'data' or 'data'?").

In Japanese, the formalizations of polite speech vs impolite speech are significantly more rigorous than in English. So much so that different words and grammatical changes to words occur. You can insult someone by saying "I watched my boss be given an anniversary present by their boss" by using the word 'give' word which implies the recipient or the giver are a lower social status than you the observer.

> [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga

Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.

He even goes on to give an example of everyday Japanese as something nobody outside of a manga would say.

You misquoted me :)

I said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.

Combination of kanji to create new words is a feature of Chinese, which Japanese inherits. It’s the same way we (used to) coin words in European languages by reaching for Latin and Greek.

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